RootsTech

So this is where I spent today. And last night. Last night I volunteered for a shift helping register people in and in return I was able to attend for free! Yeah for me! It wasn't too bad volunteering either, I met people from all over the world, including a couple who live down the street from my Aunt and Uncle in Stirling, AB, Canada. Funny, eh? Especially since there are over 4,200 people in attendance. I got a free t-shirt and the guys running it bought us all a Crown Burger with fries and delicious chocolate shake. Yum.

Today, I didn't feel it necessary to wake up extremely early to get there in time for the keynote speaker, so I arrived in good time for the first seminar (11 AM). Yes, I like my sleep.

And well, the seminars I attended were so-so. One was just a website the guy made with random tools, genealogical tools for the most part, but also tools like one that automatically snipes for you on Ebay. Umm, yeah. Cool, but not that useful to me. The next I kind-of slept through. It was about restoring documents using multi-spectrum photography. Again, cool that they can take charred and blackened documents that suffered damage in WWII bombings and produce photos that are readable. However, completely useless to me since I can't afford the $$$$$$$ equipment. I thought it was going to be more along the lines of using photoshop. And the next two were about umm....creating a blog that looks like a webpage (there was NOTHING else appealing that hour). Yeah, I got that down, and another about "Creating Interactive Family Histories." It was all right.

Really, my greatest find of the whole day was this:

I now know what I want for Christmas. Ahhhh, sigh. It was love at first sight. What a beautiful little thing it is. A mobile scanner, about the size of an iPad. Next time I go to Colombia, I am taking this with me. Hopefully, the next time we go to visit any of his relatives, I have this with me. It works way better than a camera because you don't have to worry about lighting, tripod, etc., which was what I had been taking with me on my next trip until I saw this beauty.

The other thing I found that was so tempting, was the DNA testing. I would love to have Leo Y-DNA tested and mtDNA tested. And autosomal DNA tested.

I think it would be fascinating. I don't think my own would be that fascinating because I know a lot about my genealogy already. But Leo, that would give us an idea if he's Spanish descent (okay more than likely) but also some native tribe or Italian or I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't be that cool, but honestly, DNA is just fascinating altogether, even if it didn't tell us much.

Hopefully the seminars are better tomorrow. But I will say this, it did certainly increase my enthusiasm to start working on some family history projects that have been shelved for a while. My many, many projects. :)